Amazon servers usher in a dark cloud

Web 2.0 suffered plenty of downtime today, as an outage at one of Amazon’s EC2 datacenters actually managed to down some Web 2.0 darlings including Quora and Reddit. The service’s status site pointed out that things started to go awry more than six hours ago (at time of publishing), when tech-heads started “investigating latency and error rates with EBS volumes and connectivity issues reaching EC2 instances in the US-EAST-1 region”. Of course, with the rest of Europe working and the East Coast of the US starting to wake up, things did not get better, but the opposite instead.

By 3.20am PDT, error rates were claimed to be in recovery mode, but as of 6.59am PDT, the message mentioned otherwise. Read the following and have a hoot, “There has been a moderate increase in error rates for CreateVolume. This may impact the launch of new EBS-backed EC2 instances in multiple availability zones in the US-EAST-1 region.”

Quora’s website did not reveal too much however, just stating that “We’re currently having an unexpected outage, and are working to get the site back up as soon as possible. Thanks for your patience.”, while Hootsuite has not let out a beep.

Reddit does seem to be taking submissions, although no attempt with its search service showed anything other than “Amazon is currently experiencing a degradation. We are still waiting on them to get to our volumes. Sorry.”